Yesterday Evening,

we watched a Arnold Schwarzenegger movie,

photograph Wang and Pan et al. which reminded me in the film Terminator 2 of his antagonist, the advanced T-1000 shapeshifting android, that in one scene walked through the bars of a jail cell, and today I noticed this metallic shape shifter, it is a small robot that can melt and resolidify itself on command, enabling it to easily escape from confined spaces, a international team of scientists embedded microscopic chunks of magnetic neodymium, boron and iron into liquid gallium, a metal that has a very low melting point. Then, by using magnets to command the miniature robot to melt and turn into a puddle, they guided it through the bars of a cage, before having it resolidify into the original shape on the other side,

 “The magnetic particles here have two roles,” Carmel Majidi, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, said in a statement. “One is that they make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field, so you can, through induction, heat up the material and cause the phase change. But the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the ability to move in response to the magnetic field.” As it happens the team behind this project took inspiration not from James Cameron’s blockbuster but from sea cucumbers, marine creatures that can switch from stiff to soft states when the need arises, “Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid states endows them with more functionality,” Chengfeng Pan, an engineer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and lead researcher on the project, said, so we are now one step nearer to creating a T-1000 shapeshifting android, and there was me thinking the T-100 was science fiction!